Tag Archives: Personal Blather

Hey! If you ever want to create a false-positive for bad RAM in the new MacBook series, I’ve got a foolproof way to do so!

You’ll need two MacBooks. Put them both on a flat surface. Close one of them, then set the other MacBook on top of it. Power up the top MacBook. It will start up, and a few seconds later the power light will start gently pulsing but the screen will remain black. No matter what keys you hit, it won’t wake up.

Ta Dah! Those are the symptoms of a failed Power On Self Test due to bad or missing RAM.

What’s actually happened is that there’s a little rare-earth magnet in lid of MacBook that closes a switch in the body of the MacBook when the lid is closed. The magnet in the bottom MacBook is closing the switch in the top MacBook. The top MacBook will not wake up – as far as it is concerned, its lid is closed.

In one of the classes where I’m a projectionist, they showed a documentary on Jack Kerouac. It included a few clips from this episode of William F. Buckley’s show “Firing Line”…

Honestly, I’ve got very little sympathy for Kerouac – showing up drunk for the show and blabbering on like he does is beyond unprofessional. But I can see why he’d need some insulation between himself and reality here. Every time Buckley opens his mouth and drones on in his smug, condescending voice… Well, if he were alive I’d want to slap him. As it is, I fight the urge to rent a back-hoe, dig him up and turn his blithering skull into a bathroom fixture.

Here’s the deal. I’m going to try to post here more often, but no promises. I’ve been doing some server maintenance that had fallen by the wayside, and it kind of kicked off my urge to vent more in public. Y’see, the hosting company got hacked back in January and I needed to reset my login passwords. Then I checked the server logs and found that I had an insecure installation of some gallery software that had become a link farm for spam sites. And some Russian streaming music site had somehow sucked up half my bandwidth.

So obviously I haven’t paid enough attention to this place for far too long. To make up for it, I’ve just gone through and back-linked a whole slew of comics. Read, enjoy, comment on them here. I’ll post other stuff too, I promise.

Last Friday’s comic necessitated the purchase of a prop – an actual can of actual Spam™ to be chopped up into little cubes and fed through an hourglass. I asked my Wife to get it while she was out shopping with a friend of ours. My Wife couldn’t find it in the store, so Friend decided to ask an employee. And now I have a little comic scene stuck in my head.

I have an interesting talent: I can carry on a semi intelligent conversation even while drifting off to sleep. There have been several occasions when my wife has been talking to me and hasn’t noticed that I was snoozing. Unfortunately, ther illusion of wakefulness tends to evaporate pretty quickly when my dreaming mind hijacks the conversation.

Earlier tonight, for example, was my statement in the middle of a fairly ordinary conversation about the day’s events: “Flavor foods are an excellent way to destroy zombies!”

I still don’t know what that means. But at the time, it made perfect sense.